Pronominally peeking

I'm sure that in some people group this marks me as one of the worldly and selfish and foolhardy ignoramae, but I get ultrasounds when I'm pregnant. Often just one, but a few times we've had reason for a precautionary follow up. God has been very gracious to us and the results have always been good so that I am able to write here about a shallow joy: finding out if it's a boy or a girl.

I know that from time immemorial people haven't known until the baby is born, but I really like finding out ASAP. The day we learned our first baby was a girl, my husband said to me at home later, "When she's born . . . " and that "she" blew my mind. Not it! She! I hate praying for IT. I like to pray for HIM or HER. IT sounds too much like a thing to me. HE or SHE is a person.

I know we might not be able to see sometime, or we might be told the wrong thing, or we might even decide we don't want to know. Doubtless there's some argument about God's ownership of our children and the nature of trust and whatever else advocating the traditional mystery as the higher road. But I'm vulgar and I love the day the baby stops being IT.

Thank you!

Under random circumstances, I found myself talking to a random person, a pastor-type grandpa-type person, and I had a baby with me, and he asked if it were my first, and I said no it was my fifth, and he, shocked, said, "Five! That's wonderful! Not just for you, for us! We need more of that! Thank you!"

Thank you! He said that! So girls, I wanted to pass it on. Thank you.

What the seminaries should actually tell candidate wives instead of all the overblown and unnecessary stuff they do tell them

If you hated it here and never got to know anyone and worked like crazy at a miserable job to keep your family solvent this whole time and are so glad these awful years are over, you can skip the next two paragraphs.

But if you liked it here, it may be important for you to hear that this place is fake. Here you have been surrounded by people who are like you. Your friends were your age. Their husbands did the same thing your husband does. You had kids the same age. You had comparable costs of living and means with which to support yourselves. You had similar educations, pieties, and convictions about Windex. You shared bunches of bananas and fears for husbands finishing papers and maternity clothes. You woke up to the same weather and the same clearance at Old Navy. You went to the finest churches and when you could get there, there was chapel every day.

This place was college with benefits. You, like your friends who work in law firms and beauty shops and schools, will now have live among people who are not like you, who are not your age, who are not interested in the things you are interested in, who think you're weird but are nice to you anyway, who think you're weird and aren't nice to you, who think your ideas about Windex are idiotic, who will be mad that you're on WIC, who will be mad that you won't go on WIC, whose piety is different than yours, whose kids watch TV, who think kids are gross, who haven't been to as much school as you, who have been to way more school than you, who have way more money than you, who have way less money than you. Your church might be bronzy or crabby or taciturn or clappy. The organist might tell your husband, "I can't play that" when he hands her a bulletin draft including "To Jordan Came Our Lord." The senior pastor will treat him like a vicar.

Some churches love their pastors and others don't. Some churches will leave you too much alone, others will find reasons to tramp through your kitchen every week. Some churches will care what you drive or eat, how you treat a cold or teach your kids, and others won't. Some churches will expect you to be at everything and others will get mad because you're trying to take over everything. Some churches will have friends for you and some won't.

We don't know what kind of place you're going. We don't know why they didn't have a pastor until they called your husband. All we can tell you is that you should have six chief parts in common with your new neighbors. That's it.

You should try to do the right thing. And thanks for the money.

UPDATE: And if your husband is one of the people we pocket vetoed or threw under the bus, we don't have to say we're sorry. We're the seminary.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche

I can't help but notice that Kleaning isn't on this list.

I'll see you when I see you.

Falling apart

One matter of specifics we don't get into much here is the literal falling apart we're doing. That's because it's icky. But there isn't a Concordian Sister in the world who isn't falling apart one way or another. A girl just can't have a baby without getting messed up*, and the more times you hit repeat, well . . . .

I was talking to a postpartum lady about her personal falling apartness, and all I could say was, "That's horrible. I'm so glad that doesn't happen to me." She said, "I'd rather have that than what you've got!" So that cheered us both up.

What someone else has always sounds worse. What we've got, well, we don't love it, but obviously we can live with it. That awful thing you've got, though? No thanks! :D

*A girl also can't not have a baby without getting messed up.

And that's how it is

Many nights ago, I had a trash bag full of trash. EVER so full of trash. Trash largely of a nature of which we have spoken here before; namely, the trash of others which they are unable to trash. We will call it "füdtrash," received as it was in such vast quantity as to prohibit its total consumption or quartering. Warm was this füdtrash, and squishy.

Excepting one year of our married life, my husband and I have not taken trash to the corner in a marital trash can like a proper man and wife but rather have shared a dumpster with other families and/or institutions. This night occurred not in that year of propriety. Excepting occasional exigent trips to dumpsters, my husband takes out the trash like a proper man, but again, we speak not of a night of propriety. There were reasons for this: a long day of physical labor on his part, an overstuffing of trash bags on my part for which I did not wish to be reprimanded again, the loathing of Wifekind to ask Mankind to take out the trash.

This reprimandible overstuffing found my feeble self dragging my füdtrash along the ground from dwelling to dumpster. It found me propping my warm, overstuffed füdtrash against the dumpster while I opened the lid. It found me swinging my squishy füdtrash back and forth, putting that momentum paragraph from ninth grade science and the more memorable thingy on my teacher's desk to good use. It found me mustering strength for a final heave. It found my füdtrash arcing promisingly, then embarrassingly evacuating itself out the bottom of the misused bag all over the ground.

Alas. Alas.

Shared dumpster. Traffic in vicinity of shared dumpster guaranteed in morning (barring certain eschatological events, which history now shows did not occur). Ground thickly covered in warm füdtrash and distinctive, incriminating personal items. Basic human decency. My path was clear.

Thus did I run back to my dwelling and return to the scene of my crime with a plethora of bags. Bags for my hands, bags for my füdtrash, bags for my bags. And in the dark night, I felt along the ground for my trash. I gathered my trash to me. I picked up the fluttering Tootsie Roll wrappers and the greasy junk mail, the overnight diaper and the pineapple top, the off-brand Kleenices stiff with their ministry and the off-brand Gladware that broke when it fell out of my overstuffed freezer. Most of all, I gathered up my warm füdtrash. Out of the grass did I rake up with baggéd fingers my reconstituted potato flakes, my quivering gravy. Under the quarter moon did I gather my trash even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings. I put my trash in new bags, and did toss these understuffed bags easily into the dumpster. Verily, they floated above me like jellyfish on the wing.

My amiable consort, missing me at last, called to me from our dwelling, but I assured him all was well. I found a hose, and hooked it up, and sprayed the lingering füdtrash into a more considerate arrangement for the morning's sure traffic. I closed the dumpster. I walked home.

And through it all my heart quickened not, neither did my nose burn; yea, my soul was at peace: for no child wept, and no child tugged at me, and no child whined, and no child bickered, and no child needed to be nursed, and no child bled, and no child painted another's sweater, and no child frolicked in the litter box, and no child profaned his trousers, and no child consumed an ink cartridge, for every child slept and no child knew. Wherefore I devoted myself wholeheartedly to the task and completed it well and satisfactorily, free of panic, wrath, or interruption; and I went to sleep at once and in good cheer.

The Masculine Mystique

I knew little of the lives of my younger brothers and sister in our teen years for reasons of mutual disinterest and, in my case, jerkiness. What tidings I heard of the brothers in particular were strange, mostly dealing with pyrotechnics and ballistics and complex vandalism involving defunct appliances and acquaintances' yards. I did not understand these things.

I married a man, and he became the friend and enemy of these brothers. They demanded time together for the purpose of ridiculing and injuring and defeating each other. They invented structures and folkways for the purpose of better accomplishing these goals. Where vandalism decreased, pyrotechnics and ballistics swelled and overflowed the balance.

None of these men looked particularly suspect. Lean, yes, but more quarterback than linebacker. Indeed not even quarterbacks, but tennis players and speechies, Coen aficionados and history buffs and Greek tutors. Why, then, the violence? Why the idiocy? Why the inflicting and inviting of utterly pointless pain? Why the games (games!) wherein loss threatened emasculation? Why the retrieval of submarine-sized logs from a frigid Gitche Gumee, equipped only with swim trunks and a moronic will?

Girls, I'll tell you. They are practicing. In this time and place they will probably not be called upon for the ultimate trial of manhood. But they might. And they would be ready. They would know fear. They would know courage. They would suffer pain. They would prevail. They would go first. They would leave last. For us.

And so he must appear to be an imbecile, because a world safe as ours gives him little authentic opportunity to put himself to the test. For both of these things we should be grateful. In time, he will teach his sons the same, and they will learn to fight and kill and suffer and yet come home to eat the cookies we baked in their absence.

Tell him he was real tough next time he comes in all sweaty.

Cecil's voice came: "My dear Freddy, I am no athlete. As you well

remarked this very morning, 'There are some chaps who are no good for

anything but books'; I plead guilty to being such a chap, and will not

inflict myself on you."

The scales fell from Lucy's eyes. How had she stood Cecil for a

moment? He was absolutely intolerable, and the same evening she broke

off her engagement.

Washed, beautiful, inflamed!

Gauntlets just referenced Chrysostom, and his words in yesterday’s Treasury are humming 'round my head again. You’ll want them in yours, too, because no matter what goes down in the pew-trenches on Sunday morning, you will return home triumphant with this:

Let us then return from [the Communion table] like lions breathing fire, having become terrible to the devil….This blood causes the image of our King to be fresh within us. It produces beauty unspeakable and prevents the nobleness of our souls from wasting away….The blood [of Christ] is the salvation of our souls. By it the soul is washed, is beautiful, and is inflamed! This blood causes our understanding to be more bright than fire and our soul more beaming than gold. This blood was poured forth and opened heaven.

(More here)

Satan, you wicked one, own now your master!
Jesus has come! He, the mighty Redeemer.

“The majority of people in today's churches are feminists--and they don't even know it."

How’s that for a potentially inflammatory post title? :D It's preceded by the very apt observation, "Feminism has seeped into people’s systems like intravenous drugs into the veins of an unconscious patient."

All the –isms, to say nothing of the –ists, get to be a bit much for my underexercised mental apparatus (we’re in post-post-modernism now, right?), but as I’ve got somewhat of a professional interest in the feminist stuff, I like to at least skim things like this, and thought some of y’all might like to as well.

(Possibly unnecessary note of clarification: We at CSPP don’t necessarily hang our hat squarely on the peg of the complementarian position apparently held by this author.)

HT: My Own Mother

Snowed in?

Make these.

Actually, make them even if you're not snowed in.